New CD and the One Spark Festival.

We’re in the thick of planning for our week-long effort at the One Spark Festival in Jacksonville. What is the connection to our new CD? This will be the critical fundraising effort for the new CD. We are in the middle of the recording process and we’ve exhausted our surplus funds paying for studio time. We’re hoping that One Spark will be our opportunity to raise the funding we need to finish recording, mixing and mastering, manufacturing and distributing the new CD.

What is One Spark? One Spark is the world’s largest crowdfunding festival. It is held at multiple venues in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. The concept is simple: “creators” sign up to pitch their projects during the festival. Participants at the festival have the opportunity to cast votes for the creators they like, and those creators will get a share of the money raised at the festival based on the percentage of the votes they manage to collect. There are 555 creators in a whole list of categories: Art, Education, Health & Science, Music, Social Good, Technology. The creators get matched with a venue where they can set up and pitch their project, as well as having the opportunity to present their ideas on central “pitch decks” or music stages. Check out the One Spark web site for more information about the various projects, venues, and other events.

In addition to getting a share of the funding based on the percentage of votes (up to $15,000), there will also be prizes awarded by a jury based on the largest amount of independent donations.

Where will we be? Passerine has been matched up with 1904 Music Hall, so that’s where we’ll be hanging out most of the time. In addition, we’ll be collecting as many opportunities to perform as we can possibly manage, and we also plan to drag our instruments out and about so we can play on the street. We need to get as many votes as we possibly can during the time we will be there (Tuesday, April 7 until Sunday, April 12).

In addition to the 1904 Music Hall (schedule to be determined), we’ve already been scheduled to play on the main stage at Jacksonville Landing at 3:20 on Saturday, April 11.

Other than that, we’ll post our schedule and location continuously on Twitter and FB so our friends can always find us.

How can you help? I’m sure this is the first question that popped into your head. There are three ways that friends and supporters can help us out.

VOTE. If possible, come to the festival and VOTE. Registration is free (although they ask for a voluntary donation to the crowd fund). Once your registration has been validated at check-in, you’ll be able to vote– either by using the special app for smart phones, one of the kiosks set up around the venues, or on the web site.

DONATE. Even if you can’t come to the festival, you can still support us by donating something to our effort. Once the festival starts, you’ll be able to go to our One Spark profile and click a button to donate. This works pretty much like Kickstarter: donate to the project and there will be a selection of rewards offered based on the level of contribution. (We’re still working on the menu of rewards, but ANY contribution will get you a free download preview of the new CD.) What makes it different from Kickstarter is that the more donations we get, the better our chance at winning additional funding from One Spark.

SPREAD THE WORD. More than anything else, we need people to participate in the festival and vote for us. If you have any friends, relatives, business associates, pen pals, casual acqaintances, former spouses, or mass mailing lists in the greater Jacksonville area, PLEASE urge them to go to One Spark, check out all the cool stuff and VOTE for Passerine (creator number 21864). At the very least, please friend us on Facebook and urge everyone you know to do the same.

Come see us in Jacksonville. We’ll have some special gifts for our friends from Facebook, so be sure to come and talk to us.